- From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
- Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 13:27:10 -0400
- To: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>, <xml-uri@w3.org>
John Cowan wrote: > > > Jonathan Borden wrote: > > > The point being that many commonly used URI schemes in fact > employ context > > information for resource resolution and are in this sense relative. > > True but irrelevant. "Absolute" does not mean "independent of context" > when applied to URI references. > Perhaps irrelevant to your own view of the issues. An since you understand this all so very well you really needn't participate in the current discussion unless to help the rest of use clarify these issues in our own heads. Since we are on the topic of clarification, this whole discussion started because of the perception that there is a "bug" in the namespace spec allowing relative URIs to be compared on a literal basis. This entire voluminous and lengthy discussion is about the issues involving relative URIs in the context of namespaces. Several well respected individuals have discussed the desire to use URIs to reference and sometimes even obtain resources, such as schemata. In the context of this discussion it has been noted that comparing relative URI references on a literal basis would give the mistaken impression that they would resolve to identical resources. In this context the resource would be an actual schema document. I am merely trying to point out the fact that this 'problem' is not unique to relative URI references but to absolute URIs. This problem is relevent because it concerns difficulties in the idea of using namespace URIs to *obtain* resources and is presumably why the original DOCTYPE includes an FPI as well as a SYSTEMID. So we see that few things are really absolute and irrelevence depends on your context. Jonathan Borden
Received on Friday, 26 May 2000 14:05:05 UTC